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From Spaceflight to Attempted Murder Charge

Like most of today’s astronauts, Lisa Marie Nowak worked in relative obscurity — even last July, when she took the spaceflight that she had spent 10 years at NASA hoping for.

She is famous now, the smiling image of her in astronaut gear a sharp contrast with her police mugshot, a woman with wild hair wearing an expression of personal devastation.

She is charged with the attempted murder of a woman she believed to be her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. Police officials say she drove 900 miles to Florida from Texas, wearing a diaper so she would not have to stop for rest breaks. In Orlando, they say, she confronted her rival in a parking lot, attacking her with pepper spray.

Captain Nowak was in disguise at the time, wearing a wig, the police said. She had with her a compressed air pistol, a steel mallet, a knife, pepper spray, four feet of rubber tubing, latex gloves and garbage bags.

Those who know her say they are mystified. “I was in shock,” said Dennis Alloy, 43, of Tysons Corner, Va., a friend and high school classmate. “When I knew her, I couldn’t imagine an evil bone in her body.”

Many inside and outside the space agency are wondering how the problems of Captain Nowak, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1985 and served in the Navy before joining National Aeronautics and Space Administration, were not detected before this. Many are also wondering whether the “Right Stuff” image of astronauts has been tarnished, or if that image somehow confused technical excellence with emotional stability.

“Like any other people, they’re human,” said George Abbey, director of the Johnson Space Center when Commander Nowak was selected for the astronaut corps, who recalled her as “an outstanding candidate.”

Captain Nowak, 43, was arrested at 4 a.m. Monday at Orlando International Airport, the police said, after attacking the other woman, Capt. Colleen Shipman of the Air Force.

Photo

NASA's portrait of Lisa Nowak.Credit
NASA via Associated Press

According to the police report, by Detective William C. Becton, Captain Nowak said that she had not intended to harm Captain Shipman and that she believed that “this was the only time she was going to be able to speak” with her. The compressed air pistol she carried “was going to be used to entice Ms. Shipman to talk with her,” according to the report.

Detective Becton wrote, “When I asked Mrs. Nowak if she thought the pepper spray was going to help her speak with Ms. Shipman, she replied, ‘That was stupid.’ ”

According to the police report, Captain Nowak said she saw Captain Shipman, 30, as a rival for the affection of Cmdr. William A. Oefelein, a fellow astronaut. She told the police that she and Commander Oefelein, whose NASA nickname is Billy-O, had “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.” Commander Oefelein, 41, is divorced and has two children.

Tuesday was a day of confusion and quickly shifting events. Captain Nowak, a married mother of three, was brought before a judge for arraignment at 8:30 a.m. Two of her fellow astronauts — the chief of NASA’s astronaut office, Col. Steven W. Lindsey of the Air Force, and Capt. Christopher J. Ferguson of the Navy — were there to offer support.

The judge had agreed to release Captain Nowak on $15,000 bond on charges of kidnapping and battery, but the police added a charge of attempted murder, and bail was increased to $25,000.

Captain Shipman is seeking a protective order against Captain Nowak, according to documents posted on the Web site of The Orlando Sentinel, which broke the story Monday night.

In Orlando at the end of the day, Captain Nowak posted bail and later in the evening was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet so her movements could be monitored after her return to Houston.

“She’s is going home,” said her lawyer , Donald Lykkebak.

Captain Nowak and her husband, Richard, a flight controller for the International Space Station, live with their children in a two-story brick-and-glass home in Houston.

Few neighbors there wanted to talk about the case, but one, who asked that his name not be used, said the couple had an argument in November with raised voices and the sound of breaking china.

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Cmdr. William Oefelein and Capt. Lisa Nowak in winter training in Valcartier, Quebec, in January 2004.Credit
Scott Audette/Reuters

No one was home on Tuesday.

A statement from the family last night on the Sentinel Web site said that the Nowaks had been married for 19 years but that Captain Nowak and her husband “had separated a few weeks ago.”

Earlier in the day, Michael Coats, the director of the Johnson Space Center, said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened by this tragic event. The charges against Lisa Nowak are serious ones that must be decided by the judicial system.”

Mr. Coats said Captain Nowak was “officially on 30-day leave and has been removed from flight status and all mission-related activities.”

How could a person involved in such a case rise within the space agency, which is famous for its psychological screening of astronaut candidates?

Nick Kanas, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied astronaut psychology, said that the screening occurs only at the very beginning of the process and that once an astronaut has gotten through the front door, the formal psychological evaluations give way to evaluation of job performance. Psychological counseling is available but not mandatory, he said.

“We can screen out very serious stuff, but we can’t always predict the future,” Professor Kanas said, and “people change over time.”

Captain Nowak first came to the space program in April 1996 and finally flew aboard the space shuttle in July 2006.

During the 13-day flight of the shuttle Discovery, which was launched on July 4 of last year, she operated the robot arm during spacewalks with her crewmate Stephanie D. Wilson, earning them the shared nickname Robo Chicks.

As an astronaut she performed roles including capcom, the astronaut who communicates with orbiting space station crews.

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Captain Nowak, rear, at the Orange County Jail in Florida on Tuesday.Credit
Terry Renna/Associated Press

Professor Kanas said that most astronauts went through the experience of finally reaching space and came out well but that “for some it’s very difficult to adjust” to seeing the abrupt end of something they have worked so hard to achieve.

“These people are extremely well-suited, by personality and training, to deal with the stresses of being in space,” Professor Kanas said. But, he added, “that doesn’t mean that they’re not vulnerable to emotional problems, or problems in their relationships.”

Today’s astronauts find themselves in a world much less glamorous than the original crews. While the Mercury Seven raced Corvettes, today’s family-oriented fliers are likelier to tool around in minivans. They spend much more time in suburbia than in orbit, and there are no more ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes.

Some former officials of the space program said that romantic thoughts and even love triangles were not unknown to the program but that it was up to management to watch carefully and intervene.

Mr. Abbey, the former Johnson Space Center director, said, “You’ve got some hard-charging people, and you need to manage them.” Problems like this “don’t happen overnight,” and so “you have to be sensitive to what your people are doing.”

Now and then on his watch, he recalled, “I stepped in, and people weren’t happy about it,” he recalled, but it was important to tell them that “what you’re doing is not a personal thing for you — it’s affecting a lot of people around you, and affecting your performance.”

Christopher Kraft, NASA’s original flight director, said he was surprised. If someone was slipping toward such trouble, Mr. Kraft said, “your fellow crew members would pick that up.”

Captain Nowak’s use of a diaper on the long drive to Florida is no mystery to astronauts. Mike Mullane, a retired astronaut, said many astronauts wear a device — “we call them urine collection devices” — during launching, landing and spacewalks, “when you’re in a pressure suit and cannot get to a toilet.”

Other mysteries in the case could be more persistent. Michael Stone, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, said he was struck by the thoroughness of Captain Nowak’s preparation, which he said was generally “a guy thing.”

“It’s extraordinarily rare for a woman to do this type of a crime,” Professor Stone said. He said the more customary response was to try to kill the object of affection, as Jean Harris shot Herman Tarnower in 1980. “This is really close to unique in the annals of female crime,” he said.